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From the world of physics, we have a retraction involving rivalry and alleged sock puppetry. The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology has removed a letter from its website after a scientist complained that it was making unproven allegations against him.

According to the new piece, the leader of [Laser Geodynamics Satellites] LAGEOS, Italian physicist Ignazio Ciufolini, published two manuscripts, each criticizing one of the rivals to LAGEOS. These rivals were other projects that tried (and seemingly succeeded) in measuring frame-dragging. Ciufolini didn’t sign these critiques with his own name, however. He used two different pseudonyms: “G. Felici” and “G. Forst”.

“Felici” and “Forst” each used a Yahoo email address (i.e. not an academic one), and each listed as a contact address an institution that does not in fact exist.

“Felici” and “Forst” published their criticisms in 2007. Last year (i.e. six years later), the moderators of the arXiv site, where the manuscripts had been posted, outed Ciufolini as the true author of both, dubbing him “a physicist based in Italy who is unwilling to submit articles under his own name” and who “repeatedly submits inappropriate articles under pseudonyms, in violation of arXiv policies.” (For more on this saga, see this blog.)

…Mr. Iorio accuses me in posting on the ArXiv (an online repository of electronic preprints of scientific papers) some of my works under pseudonyms “Forst” and “Felici”.

However, any accusation in this world must be propped up with proof. Without proof, accusation becomes libel and slander. The misaccusation by Mr. Iorio is based solely on a previous hypothesis by the ArXiv moderators that was later on removed by the ArXiv and substituted by: “This submission has been removed because ‘G. Forst‘ is an apparent pseudonym, in violation of arXiv policies” http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3934 . This sentence was on the ArXiv before Mr. Iorio published his offensive paper. That means that the ArXiv moderators realized the mistake or at least the risk of using a statement without proof. Consequently, Mr. Iorio should not have used the name Ciufolini nor the editor of a journal should have allowed to publish a paper with such offensive words and unproven statements. In other words the content of the above article is based on an unfounded accusation.

Ciufolini then cited the case of Isaac Newton, whom he said used “various other names” including “Jehovah Sanctus Unus.”

Ciufolini is correct that the now-removed comments on arXiv are the best available evidence that he is Forst and Felici. But he never quite said that he did not use Forst and Felici as pseudonyms, and he did not respond directly to Neuroskeptic’s questioning on the matter.

It is clear that there exist between you a deep-rooted disagreement related to the matter of alleged pseudonymous publishing, one that, on reflection, I do not feel should be aired in the pages of JASIST. You are both career physicists, active in the field and working in Italy. Moreover, as best I can tell, you have actually co-authored papers on multiple occasions. It, therefore, makes much more sense for your disagreement, whatever its origins and dimensions, to be discussed and arbitrated on locally by members of either the physics community or the Italian higher education system.

The letter from Dr. Iorio has been removed from the JASIST (Early View) website and will not now be published in the Journal.

Here’s Iorio’s letter, which was considered a “Special accept (without external review)” and which despite Cronin’s email is still available online behind a paywall:

Dear Sir,

In this Letter to the Editor, two cases of fraudulent scientific conduct in the field of the physical sciences that occurred in 2007 on the arXiv preprint repository maintained by Cornell University are reported.

They pertain to the so-called gravitomagnetic frame-dragging, or Lense–Thirring effect, which is a prediction of the general theory of relativity about the behavior of gyroscopes and satellites moving in the gravitational field of a rotating body such as, for example, the Earth. It has been the subject of intense experimental scrutiny in recent years. Perhaps the most famous experiment aimed at testing frame-dragging is the spacecraft-based Gravity Probe B (GP-B) mission.1 It was launched in 2004, and its Principal Investigator was F. Everitt. The results of its data analysis were finally announced in May 2011, reporting a successful measurement of the relativistic tiny shifts of the axes of four gyroscopes carried onboard within a claimed margin of uncertainty of 19%. A direct competitor of GP-B is the ongoing analysis of the laser-ranged observations of the geodetic satellites of the Laser Geodynamics Satellites (LAGEOS) family performed by I. Ciufolini and coworkers. In October 2004, they reported a successful detection of the Lense–Thirring shift of the satellites’ orbital planes with a claimed 10% accuracy. Since then, such a level of uncertainty has been questioned in several papers by myself and others; it may be larger by a factor of 2 to 3, or perhaps even more. In 2006, I suggested that the Lense–Thirring effect may have been detected by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft orbiting Mars with an accuracy of a few percent.

In March 2007, a certain G. Felici suddenly popped up on arXiv. He posted a preprint criticizing the interpretation of the MGS data that I had proposed. G. Felici, who has not published anything before or after that date, claimed to be based in via Attilio Regolo 2, 20138, Milano, Italy, and he used the e-mail gia.felici@yahoo.it To date, his preprint has not been published in any peer-reviewed journal. In December 2013, the arXiv’s moderators added the following comment to Felici’s preprint: “This submission has been made by G. Felici, a pseudonym of Ignazio Ciufolini, who repeatedly submits inappropriate articles under pseudonyms, in violation of arXiv policies.”

In December 2007, a certain G. Forst, who had never published anything before, appeared on arXiv. He posted a manuscript criticizing certain aspects of the GP-B mission. His e-mail, g.forst@yahoo.com, was not an academic one, and it was not possible to retrieve Forst’s alleged institution, FGP Behrenstr. 1 10117 Berlin, on the Internet. In January 2008, arXiv’s moderators retracted Forst’s preprint with the following comment: “This submission has been removed because ‘G.Forst’ is a pseudonym of a physicist based in Italy who is unwilling to submit articles under his own name. This is in explicit violation of arXiv policies. Roughly similar content, contrasting the relative merits of the LAGEOS and GP-B measurements of the frame-dragging effect, can be found in pp. 43–45 of (Ciufolini, 2007).” Nonetheless, I. Ciufolini was the sole author in the scientific community who frequently cited Forst’s preprint in presentations given at international meetings and institutions as well as in preprints and peer-reviewed papers. After 6 years, in September 2013,2 the arXiv’s moderators altered their original comment by writing “This submission has been removed because ‘G.Forst’ is a pseudonym of Ignazio Ciufolini, who repeatedly submits inappropriate articles under pseudonyms. This is in explicit violation of arXiv policies. Roughly similar content, contrasting the relative merits of the LAGEOS and GP-B measurements of the frame-dragging effect, can be found in pp. 43–45 of (Ciufolini, 2007).” In May 2011, I. Ciufolini congratulated the GP-B team after they released their results by stating that “GP-B was a beautiful and challenging experiment,” as reported in an online blog run by Nature.

At present, I do not know why arXiv’s moderators disclosed the real identity of G. Felici and G. Forst 6 years after their original submissions.

Dear “omnologos”, why my intervention would be “wholly unnecessary”? Do not you like that I added further pieces of verifiable information? Would you have preferred not to uncover this sad story? As an Italian national would you have preferred not to deal with it just because there are two Italian scientists involved? Why this obscure and allusive tone of your intervention?

The use of pseudonyms, aliases, or fake names is an important issue, especially since whistle-blowers are demonized (broadly speaking) by society, scientific peers and governmental agencies, including academic institutes. A fake name is used for protection. For whatever reason. I guess the complexity here is that a fake name has been used to level attacks, or critiques. Is the scientific public stating that provided the cause is noble, and the comments are on the positive side of the attack/support line, that it is acceptable? Once again, I feel that this shows the inconsistencies in publishers and the scientific community.

The inconsistency is best represented by a retractions in this case by Wiley, but the publication of John Bohannon’s sting in Science (which was actualy the use of hundreds fo fake identities).

In this specific case, I am alleging that Ciufolini used two different pseudonyms (and arXiv wrote since the first retraction of the Forst paper that he “repeatedly” did so; this means that we do not know how many other pseudonyms he may have actually tried to use) to deceipt the scientific community by fabricating a false consensus against myself and the GP-B mission, so to indirectly create consensus for his own results. If, on the one hand, the GP-B team could barely have been damaged by that, it may have not been the same for myself since, at that time, I had not yet any permanent position. This is in agreement with other verifiable actions “behind-the-scenes” by Ciufolini against myself. Indeed, I still retain the emails he sent third parties against me, and forwarded to myself by such third parties.

I am a physicist, not a lawyer. By the way, I think it depends on the use of such emails. To be more clear, years ago, Ciufolini sent A, who is Italian, some emails making claims about me (….I would pose serious threatenings to every institution….I would not be capable to do multiplications…..Ah, ah, ah, ah!!!), and then A forwarded them to me. Since I am neither a childish idiot nor a poor man, and since I am a physicist, I did not waste my time with lawyiers, and, of course, I replied by publishing some dozens of peer-reviewed papers criticizing scientifically his findings. But Ciufolini did the same also with B (who lives outside Italy), and B forwarded to me his insinuations (….he tried to undermine my scientific credibility by screaming that I does not belong to any scientific institution! Comically, NASA/ADS tells us that, after just 13 years since my first publication, my metrics are already far better than Ciufolini’s metrics….LOOOOL!!) to me,

..Not to say about many other emails by foreign institutions worldwide by colleagues telling me their opinion on Ciufolini and the Nature 2004 paper affaire. But I did not forward them to anybody, of course.